At first glance this looks sensible -- if the problem recedes, don't devote as much effort to curbing it. But of course that lax attitude will only allow the problem to re-emerge after our alertness sinks below some threshold. It is like seeing that the chicken pox vaccine has lowered the prevalence, so with each new batch of infants, we don't have to worry so much about giving them the vaccine. The pathogens are still out there ready to infect our children, so we have to give them vaccines until the bug is effectively gone -- if that ever happens. Unlike smallpox, though, evil will never be eradicated from any human population. So we soften our tough-on-crime attitudes at our own peril.

A similar pattern emerges in the area of allowing vs. containing homosexual behavior. This should be a no-brainer: a conflict of interests is built into the relations between men and women, for reasons that are not relevant here (see any pop evolutionary psychology book), and natural selection has designed individual men and women to try to advance their own interests while not being exploited in agreeing to serve the other's interests.

There is thus a negative feedback loop in male-female relationships, from courtship through mating and parenting, whereby the male keeps the female in check and vice versa. Men keep their women from being such boring, nagging, asexual creatures as they might prefer deep down, while women keep their men from being such reckless, belligerent, hyperpromiscuous animals as they might prefer deep down. Not only are the individuals concerned made better off, but this better regulated system makes the society as a whole a more enjoyable place to live in.

In stark contrast, homosexual relationships break twist this negative feedback loop into a positive feedback loop, since two male minds are much more in synch with each other's desires, and so are two female minds. With the natural fetters of checks and balances torn off, males veer off on a path that is not just more harmful to themselves but to broader society, and ditto for females who become overly womanish.

Although both are in need of containment, we don't care so much about lesbians for a good reason -- women tend to be less harmful to themselves and others than men are. The exaggerated female lifestyle that lesbians embody only raises the society's level of boring and nagging personalities, and slightly drains its overall libido level ("lesbian bed death").

In contrast, the exaggerated male lifestyle that gays embody has proven disastrous to themselves -- witness the AIDS epidemic, as well as the rampant drug use and completely dehumanizing social relations, which rarely rise above meat-market interactions, that are reviewed here. Apparently that was only ended when they woke up to the consequences of their actions. While they were never capable of spreading AIDS into the broader society, they have psychologically poisoned the wider pool of straight females who we straight guys have to interact with, as I detailed here and here in the context of fag hag ego-inflation. Finally, the broader acceptance of homosexuality has killed off whatever entertainment talent they used to have that the rest of us could enjoy. Compare the music of Freddie Mercury, Rob Halford, and George Michael to k.d. lang, Lance Bass, and Clay Aiken.

So, containment of homosexuality is a good thing for everybody. And yet, as anyone who hasn't been living under a rock surely knows, tolerance of it has been shooting up. At the same time, the data suggest what might turn that around at some time in the future.

The General Social Survey asks three questions whose responses show the dramatic recent change in tolerance of homo activity. One asks how wrong homosexual sex is (HOMOSEX -- lol at the names of some of these GSS variables), how much you agree that they should be allowed to marry (MARHOMO), and if a book in favor of homosexuality, written by a homosexual, should be removed from your public library (LIBHOMO).

As I did in the case of attitudes toward crime, I've plotted the trends over time for two groups, one who tends to be more liberal and the other more conservative on the issue, during any given time period. If the change is as extreme as I'm making it out to be, then we should see that the liberal group from earlier times used to be more conservative than today's conservatives. Recall that women from 1980 to 1996 used be screaming for vengeance more than men are today. In the graphs below, the blue line represents the percent of females aged 18-29 -- the group we associate with fag haggery today -- and the red line is percent of males aged 30-44 -- the group we associate with backward bigotry (boooo!!!). You know the world is in a sorry state if today's middle-aged men are more cowardly than the young women of the not-too-distant past.

No surprise that support for gay marriage is way up, although compare young women from 1988 to middle-aged men from anytime in the past decade. Only 14% of young women used to support gay marriage, whereas middle-aged men have been in favor 19%, 34%, 43%, and 46% during the mid-late 2000s, all more pro-gay than young women's views from 1988. The gap has widened quite a bit, too, a general pattern: in 1988 it was 4 percentage points, whereas during the 2000s it has varied between 16 to 37 points. As in the case of attitudes on crime, quite different groups in society were more on the same wavelength during rising-crime times, one manifestation of greater solidarity when we've got to take on a dangerous enemy.

Support for removing the pro-gay book from the library has slid steadily among men over the entire past 40 years, although there was a 2-year anti-gay resurgence in the late '80s. Among women, support actually increased during most of the crime wave, peaking in 1988. This contradicts the view that before the gay awareness and tolerance shift of the 1990s, there had always been some constant level of anti-gay sentiment. In fact, it was increasing along with the crime rate.

My hunch here is that in the days when people were more aware of child molesters, teenage prostitution, and serial murderers, they grew more concerned that a pro-gay book would have encouraged or apologized for sick behavior in general, and in particular if gays were more likely to procure underage runaway prostitutes, entice teenage boys with drugs, fondle their 12 year-old charges if they were a priest, and so on.

Again we see that young women from the not-so-distant past had more anti-gay views than middle-aged men of recent years. We also see the near overlap of views during the height of the crime wave, and a divergence since then.

Belief that homosexual sex is always wrong shows the pattern most clearly. Middle-aged men held this view at a constantly high level during rising-crime times, peaking in 1991, after which the belief steadily dropped until in 2010 it was no longer a majority view (at 48%). Young women became more intolerant of gays during rising-crime times, again contradicting the view that there used to be some constant level of anti-gay sentiment. It went from around 50% in the mid-'70s to a peak of 73% in 1991, after which it has all but vanished, with only 20% believing it in 2010.

My hunch is the same as earlier -- that when people started seeing a rise in depravity in the world all around them, not just from gays but including them, they withdrew their support for an anything-goes, do-whatever-turns-you-on code of behavior. Once the signs of encroaching sinfulness started to fade away, however, they figured "problem solved" and have returned to the tolerant and sympathetic views of the 1950s. You never saw a hard-hitting portrayal of gay depravity in Leave It to Beaver: they were not worried because things looked like they were going along smoothly.

Turning off their defense system in this way of course set the society up for the invasion of criminals who sensed that the average person had grown so naive that they could make a killing and get away with it. They were right. We will see something similar happen after abandoning our watchtowers for so long, not just with respect to violence in general but also the dangers of unchecked homosexuality.

How long will the lessons of their self-inflicted AIDS epidemic last in the collective memory of gays? And how long will the lessons that people learned in the '70s and '80s about the dangers of permissiveness last in the memory of the broader society -- especially for people who have no first-hand recollection of that time?

The record of the last crime wave, however, should give us hope that, although it may take some time for it to kick in, people will recognize the threat and go into attack mode again. But that won't happen by magic: someone needs to be pushing it all along, so that when the attitudes in the broader society shift from inert to combustible, there will already be a flame kept burning to ignite a widespread social transformation.

26 comments:

This clause is false. Real rates of DV show that men and women are the perpetrators in roughly equal numbers. While men are more likely to hit or slap their partner, women are more likely to employ a weapon and cause more severe injury, be it a frying pan or knife or whatever. Further, lesbian couples have much higher rates of DV than you see in the general population.

"The record of the last crime wave, however, should give us hope that, although it may take some time for it to kick in, people will recognize the threat and go into attack mode again. But that won't happen by magic: someone needs to be pushing it all along, so that when the attitudes in the broader society shift from inert to combustible, there will already be a flame kept burning to ignite a widespread social transformation."

Help me understand your last paragraph, especially what you mean by "widespread social transformation."

Things won't continue in the direction they're heading, such as getting weaker on crime and on containing homo behavior. It'll turn around when the crime rate goes up again.

But that reversal doesn't happen all by itself. People become more open to the tougher mindset, but it only catches on broadly when others provide the example and everyone realizes "So I wasn't the only one!"

So there need to be people who keep the tough-on-crime and contain-the-gays mindset going even when everyone else thinks it is not as necessary, given falling crime rates and better gay behavior.

That way when people become more open to the idea, there will already be others there to provide the example.

"What do you think of the recent international survey on the repressiveness or "tightness" of societies?"

It's sad that no one remembers the gems of cultural anthropology. Much of that article is just fleshing out what Mary Douglas started with her concept of "grid" in Natural Symbols, way back in 1970.

She isn't cited, not out of plagiarism but because after the wacko decade of the 1990s and the decade of drift, the 2000s, everyone decided that all of cultural anthropology before that must have been silly too.

In fact, I've found more wisdom in the limited reading I've done from it than from just about any ev psych / sociobiology book (other than the insightful Homicide), or really any other scientific book from the past 20 years, when pop sci has never been more flourishing.

I'm planning on writing an overview of her concepts "group" and "grid" since they're the most helpful in describing how the zeitgeist changes according to the change in the violence level. Might be up Tuesday or Wednesday.

After that I'll review Ioan Lewis' model of the function that spirit possession plays in society, and then do something from Victor Turner's book The Ritual Process.

When the first Millennial runs for President, that will be his (or her?) campaign slogan.

Nah, assuming present conditions, their Apollonian faith in government and science will win out (i.e. no boredom, just thrusting! into the future!), and assuming a criminal period, they'll just act like everyone else (since you've shown there is minimal effect from a formative generational period, rather than the zeitgeist - i.e. Boomers and Xers these days are still mostly as dull on average, and old and nostalgically stuck in the past to boot).

I don't really agree with the whole "Men and women who are in relationships and interacting with one another just happen to be at the perfect evolved balance between male and female character traits, and homosexuality throws this out" idea. Seems panglossian and ridiculous.

The AIDS, and stds in general, issue exists and that's the only real issue with homosexuality. That aside, maybe things suck a bit more for straight males due to some fag hag effect (and corresponding amplification in the Jackass effect of straight boys hanging around together, where guys take lame risks and seek lame adventure), but it's hardly likely that the fag effect from a relatively miniscule numbers of gays is going to have a worse effect on overall human utility than oppressing gays or forcing them to spend time either alone or with females they have zero sexual interest in, so there's not really a problem unless you really cares about priviliging straight males over anyone else,

"So there need to be people who keep the tough-on-crime and contain-the-gays mindset going even when everyone else thinks it is not as necessary, given falling crime rates and better gay behavior.

That way when people become more open to the idea, there will already be others there to provide the example."

Agnostic,

Thanks for the clarification.

I think you're right in saying there "needs to be" a flame kept alight, but insofar as homosexuality is concerned, I don't see our society managing it, a "containment" in other words. I see us heading down the same path we did with AA. I foresee the same stupid judicial decisions on the horizon as well.

Unless a new health threat akin to AIDS arises in the gay community (and as I said previously, it inevitably will, but who knows when and who knows how the MMM will cover it since the gay lobby and press are in bed together), it looks as if the cultural train has left the station. By then, however, it's likely that gay marriage and all other such normalizing of homosexuality will have taken place.

Here's the next thing that'll happen: as gay marriage becomes common and sanctioned by either most of the states or forced on all states by SCOTUS, there will be battles over adoptions, with some judges awarding babies (who are hard to find as adoptees) to gay couples over straight couples, a further step down the road to stating that a mother and a father are not really important to a child. No matter how you feel about decent gay men and women, such a development would be suicidal to what's left of traditional marriage and to kids especially. It defies biology to create a culture in which males and females are not valued for the differences they bring to that which is of most worth--their children.

The only other thing I can think of that would change the whole dynamic is the discovery of what causes homosexuality. There are many studies going on out there, and I have to believe they're getting closer every day (although if they'd just take a more direct route and test Cochran/Ewald's hypothesis they'd probably get there much more quickly).

Discover the biological cause and suddenly things change because I am putting my money on the idea that the cause is preventable. Probably not reversible, but likely preventable once we know what environmental trigger (like a germ or toxin)affects a fetus or a young kid.

All the howling in the world by gays wouldn't stop 99% of parents from preventing it.

HOwever, I can't foresee any other things happening that stop the train right where it is, do you?

"Here's the next thing that'll happen: as gay marriage becomes common and sanctioned by either most of the states or forced on all states by SCOTUS, there will be battles over adoptions,"

I am not sure that is plausible. First, the percent of gays is very small and very stable. They can't grow as a percentage of the population. Next, very few gays want to marry. So, we are well under 1%. Single, partnered or married gays can adopt now, they just aren't that interested. Pretty much 100% of gays who want to adopt, can and do. Gays, like others, want their own kids. They will be going for reproductive tech. Obviously this is cheapest and easiest for lesbians who just need sperm. Gay men have sperm, and hiring a surrogate is expensive and genetically lower quality. New egg "donation" schemes allow gay men to choose higher quality eggs and have a low quality woman carry the pregnancy. It is a growing industry in India.

Don't misunderstand. If even one gay is denied, he/she may be willing and able to make a federal case out of it.

Some suspect that tolerating homosexuality may cause it to die out more than fighting it. It seems anti-pederasty sentiment has risen with tolerance of homosexuality.

To go in the other direction, if a few very visible people raised by gays claim molestation, public sentiment could turn against gays. It didn't happen with the Catholic priest scandal because the media successfully cast it as a Catholic problem instead of a gay problem even though 80% of victims were males. No risk of HIV from a virgin.

Another big scandal involving gays and underage males could get the public suspecting gays rather than the "system" they work in, or not.

Still with enough rope, gays may hang themselves. They did with HIV.

The issue isn't really about gays anyway. It is about the public's perception of them.

"I don't really agree with the whole "Men and women who are in relationships and interacting with one another just happen to be at the perfect evolved balance between male and female character traits, and homosexuality throws this out" idea."

No one said perfect balance -- you're projecting your own black-and-white views. I said they had a system of checks and balances, a negative feedback loop. Homosexuals invert this into a positive feedback loop.

"The AIDS, and stds in general, issue exists and that's the only real issue with homosexuality. "

Go back and read the link I posted in reference to the soul-deadening social lives that gays lead when they're left to indulge. Straights enjoy social lives that rise above the level of the rankest meat-market, humans-as-commodities-for-getting-off kind of interaction.

"but it's hardly likely that the fag effect from a relatively miniscule numbers of gays is going to have a worse effect on overall human utility than oppressing gays or forcing them to spend time either alone or with females they have zero sexual interest in"

Ah, the aspie economist reveals himself. First, you ignore the non-linear effect that the number of gays have on polluting the social and cultural lives of the remaining 95% -- each gay corrupts the minds of multiple females in real life, and even more so through their media exposure.

E.g., women in parts of the country with no fabulous boutiques to draw in a gay crowd still watch Sex and the City, listen to Clay Aiken kiss their couch potato ass, and so on. A small group can have a large effect.

And no one has said that police should be stationed next to every gay all the time to make sure they never have homosexual sex. Rather, that we should recognize that failing to shame them away from indulging in that will lead to an STD epidemic, and that we should shame them away from gay relationships (otherwise they'll get caught in the positive feedback loop), and that therefore gay marriage should not be allowed.

You mean honoring the desires of the better-behaved 95% of the population instead of the indulgence of the rest, that will be harmful to themselves and others? Only a socially isolated retard, who wouldn't face the consequences of gay pollution, would choose otherwise.

Heh, notice the key difference -- "a return." That was a slogan from apocalyptic times (1920). During the Jazz Age, the last thing anyone wanted was a boring, socially insulated, shrinking-from-adventure kind of world. They were just expressing their desire for things to not be *quite* so crazy and topsy-turvy.

It's like the yearning for the faux 1950s in Back to the Future.

The audience for that movie didn't really want to return to the 1950s, since there's no nostalgia for Leave It to Beaver living. Rather, it's about the unsupervised social lives of teenagers, punching out the bully, underage drinking, dancing to proto-rock 'n' roll, girls who were boy-crazy, making out in parked cars, and so on.

You also see that in the lyrics of the retro-rocker Huey Lewis #1 song on that soundtrack, "The Power of Love" --

Tougher than diamonds, rich like creamStronger and harder than a bad girl's dream

"HOwever, I can't foresee any other things happening that stop the train right where it is, do you?"

Not anytime soon. Again that'll have to wait until the crime rate goes up again and reminds people that smug and flippant attitudes had only prepared the way for another breakdown.

In the meantime, when the next culture war erupts -- there's usually one every 25 to 35 years -- it will obviously be about gay marriage. That's a sign of how good people have it these days: the most disgusting injustice they can uncover is that a couple of queers can't drive their friends jealous by looking so fierce in their wedding outfits.

"In the meantime, when the next culture war erupts -- there's usually one every 25 to 35 years -- it will obviously be about gay marriage."

I'm confused. I thought we were in the midst of that very culture war right now.

The people of CA, for the second or third time, voted down gay marriage. They voted it down only to have a liberal judge overturn their vote. That led to the voters amending the CA Constitution so that a specific definition of marriage was provided: "a union between one man and one woman." That was the Prop 8 vote.

A judge overturned that ( a gay judge, btw). The legal wrangling is so convoluted right now, I can't explain it only to say that gay marriages are temporarily on hold in the state and it will probably wind up in front of SCOTUS.

So, if this isn't the culture war we're in right now, I don't really know what you foresee 25 years down the road, unless you mean that that is when Americans are likely to look back and say, "Whoops, we goofed again--we didn't consider unintended consequences."

Acceptance of gay marriage seems to be a done deal. We might have a culture war in a couple of decades, but it won't be over gay marriage. We didn't have to refight culture wars over interracial marriage.

I thought the jazz age was only just beginning when Harding was campaigning. What he was really reacting against was the excesses of the Wilson administration (despite being conservative, Harding pardoned Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs) and WW1.

Ah, the aspie economist reveals himself. First, you ignore the non-linear effect that the number of gays have on polluting the social and cultural lives of the remaining 95% -- each gay corrupts the minds of multiple females in real life, and even more so through their media exposure.

Eh, and then you go on to buy into that logic anyway, and still make a calculation based on total harm and utility here. Whatever poseur bullshit you choose to style yourself as "non-aspie" or not.

(I understand why you might wish to self consciously not think of yourself as an aspie why you coldly mine social and cultural data for statistical patterns which help you make sense of and systematise the confusing social world. And of course you aren't, particularly, but that's neither here nor there.)

If you allow some arbitrary level of magnification from gay men amongst the community as a whole (from such powerful and influential social phenomena as "listening to a Clay Aiken"!) and disallow that for other social forces, then sure I guess you can get whatever relative balance of harms you wish.

No, I know you're an aspie because you used the jargon "utility," as well as the assumption that a small group cannot have a large effect -- say if only a handful of people default on their mortgages. (Another sign that economists never learn from real life.)

Watching Sex and the City is not a trivial risk. Lots of women ate it up, and had their minds severely distorted. So the non-linear effect of gays is obvious and consequential.

See also the recent Gallup survey that shows that younger people and women are totally in outer space about what fraction gays are of the population.

You're just making shit up when you say "and disallow that [magnification] for other social forces." You didn't read that in anything I wrote.

Don't bother commenting anymore. Get some practice interacting with people in real life, smoke a bowl, jerk off, and mellow out. You are way too eager to project your own extreme claims onto others. De-spazz, and maybe you can comment here again.

"you coldly mine social and cultural data for statistical patterns which help you make sense of and systematise the confusing social world"

Ha, projecting once more. Anyone with a clear head can see roughly what's going on. Data make the presentation clearer to the audience.

Again you're the clueless one -- "the only worry about gay tolerance is STDs." What an insulated moron.

I had a good number of gay friends in college, including a close one for awhile. Hung out with some chick friends at a gay club a couple times when I lived in Barcelona, when they didn't want male attention. And the neighborhood I lived in was like the Chelsea area in New York.

Nothing will cure your delusions about gay behavior when it's tolerated like going to a nightclub and seeing three separate TV screens showing hardcore gay porno movies, right next to "el cuarto oscuro" -- the dark room -- where random guys pile into a completely dark room and do whatever they want with whoever and however long they want. Talk about a disgusting positive feedback loop.

"Nothing will cure your delusions about gay behavior when it's tolerated like going to a nightclub and seeing three separate TV screens showing hardcore gay porno movies, right next to "el cuarto oscuro" -- the dark room -- where random guys pile into a completely dark room and do whatever they want with whoever and however long they want. Talk about a disgusting positive feedback loop."

Even if this sound disgusting, there is nothing in your description showing that gay behaviour affects third parties (the only people affected by the environment in that bar are the people who voluntarly decides to go to that bar).

If your theory that gays affect the behavior of heterossexual women is correct, there could be indeed a negative effect of gays in society. However, I think that your example of the Barcelona bar is unrelated with that.

"See also the recent Gallup survey that shows that younger people and women are totally in outer space about what fraction gays are of the population."

I might add that most women, no matter their age, are in outer space regarding their idiotic idea that gay men are no different than hetero couples when it comes to a monogamous union.

Men understand that two guys together in a sexually monogamous union doesn't stay that way long, married or not, together for a month, a few months, a few years, or decades. They're male. Straight males may not understand gay males in any other way, but they understand male sexual desire and societal constraints and how they differ for heteros versus homos.

Women, no, they think that two guys "in love" will settle down, get married, or if unable to marry will simply remain monogamous partners and they believe these men are no less likely to stay monogamous than a hetero couple is.

When I talk to my women friends across the country who don't live in a liberal, gay-friendly area as I do, they are stunned when I tell them that that's not how it works.

Even the gay marrieds I know (all but one couple), have understandings and arrangements that allow other sexual partners to come into the picture.

No way does the mainstream media ever point this out. The monogamous gay male couple, the couple that enters into a relationship, married or not, with the understanding that monogamy is expected and promised and "forever" is a rare, rare bird.

The only thing that wakes up my friends, who tend to argue, which makes me upset because I live around gays and they don't, is to ask them, "So, you don't think that one reason (fill-in husband's name here) has never strayed is because he knows that if he did, he'd lose his kids along with losing you, he'd be scorned by his mother and father and by your mother and father and by eveyone else in the family? And what if your female sex drive was the same in every way as his male sex drive?" At that, they shut up pretty fast with their silly notion of gay male monogamy.

Women live in la-la land about gay male marriage and let's face it, the media has contributed to creating and perpetuating the facade. "Partner" doesn't mean "only partner."

"Nothing will cure your delusions about gay behavior when it's tolerated like going to a nightclub and seeing three separate TV screens showing hardcore gay porno movies, right next to "el cuarto oscuro" -- the dark room -- where random guys pile into a completely dark room and do whatever they want with whoever and however long they want. Talk about a disgusting positive feedback loop."

BTW, I forgot in the above post to add that seeing gay porn might cure the average woman's silly notions about gay male monogamy.

They don't need to go to a nightclub to see it; it's all over the internet. Perhaps they ought to be encouraged to view for a few minute.

Kinda off-topic, but interesting nonetheless This was posted in a comment at Steve Sailer:

"Apparently when they ask Americans what % of American they thing are gay, the average estimate is that something like 25% of the population is gay. The actual % is less than 4%. I wonder how Americans got such a distorted impression?"